Have you ever found yourself speaking about something and then when you take your phone to Google the topic somehow the searchline or ads show you exactly what you’ve just talked about?
And you’d be like: “Wow, what on earth has just happened?”. The data has just been collected and processed to target your desires to either help you make better buying decision or educate yourself. Moreover, this data was remembered and might have been used to supplement your portfolio as a client.
And there is nothing wrong with it, except for a dilemma that may arise if this is a privacy violation or transparency growth. However, this is a story for another day.
The collected data is enough to present the ads targeting your interests and things that you’re most likely willing to buy or get information about.
How does Big Data help companies provide better user experience and make better business decisions?
Every time we go to the supermarket we rarely take time to think what’s going on there. Each one of us has certain behavioral and shopping patterns. We like to go to our favorite shelf in the store, get what we want and then go to another shelf and, finally, we make our way to the checkout line.
All this data is collected and processed to satisfy our needs. However, do we even care about what’s happening “behind the scenes”?
One of the ways Walmart collects data to optimize product assortment is through the analysis of customer preferences and shopping patterns. According to the data-driven approach to product assortment, it’s clear that retailers constantly face the problem of space shelf allocation because the number of products is limited.
So, the questions that arise are “What products should be displayed first?” “How much space a certain product require?” “How is buyer’s intent changes according to the weather conditions, holidays, time, etc.?”
The so-called “basket analysis” helps to make better decisions in products assortment because it uses a simple pattern of “IF something THEN something”, e.g., “IF toothbrush THEN toothpaste”. It means that somebody who has bought a toothbrush is very likely to buy toothpaste, and if these two are combined and they have a 10% share “Woah!” perfect.
Why do companies invest in Big Data?
There are plenty of ways companies, individuals, agencies and others can benefit from using Big Data which, probably, has already touched all aspects of our life.
The first reason why companies invest in Big Data is competition. They need to stand out on the market, perform better and be more creative than their competitors. The competition is very high and you can see that by looking at sabotage at Tesla which occurred recently.
According to IBM, cognitive computing systems are rapidly hardwiring in different industries such as telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, fitness and others. Each company in one way or another is looking for a way to optimize their expenses, time (delivery, development, etc.) and customer experience as you can see in the chart below, according to the Digital Trend report.
By looking at Statista report, you can see what sources of data big companies are using for big data analysis and also from which it’s clear that transaction data prevails as 64% of companies rely on it.
How do digital marketers collect and use Big Data every day?
There are different sources of data that are available for digital marketers. They are literally everywhere, in every single action. But what makes Big Data being so big?
It’s well-known that everything big starts small and we’ll talk about it later. In your everyday tasks when you analyze the customer journey, you collect a small but very reliable piece of data which you can use to proudly claim yourself a data-driven marketer.
Whenever a client interacts with your website, they take a lot of steps to convert. But it’s far more sophisticated than just making clients convert. You want them to become your subscribers and regular customers.
What data do you collect every day? The variety of data that can be used to provide better customer experience and meet your business revenue goals is huge. Looking at website heatmaps to survey results you can see that each microinteraction can be captured, analyzed and processed.
Whenever you visit a website, you might have noticed a banner that notifies you about cookies collection on the website which you can either accept or decline. At the very moment you registered and accepted it, your data (name, gender, country, email, etc.) was gathered and can be used to improve your experience with the company, app, content or product.
How can you use the data that you’ve collected? For example, you have an online store and you’re selling clothes. You may stock and analyze logs from the completed purchases.
When a customer buys a black jacket with white sleeves and black-and-white shoes which you can see are of the same style, you may want to target this customer with a brand new t-shirt that might fit your client preferences.
We have noticed that only very few companies actually run surveys. And there is a reason for it. People don’t like surveys. According to OpinionLab, 80% of customers abandon the survey without further completing it.
They are simply tired of surveys if they’re not encouraged in any way to complete them or merely don’t have any incentive (for example, a gift, promo code, share, etc., might be the right stimulus).
Companies who are not willing to invest into the high-quality surveys or at least in any forms of communication with clients are missing out on a huge opportunity to gain awareness of what their clients want, like and how they feel using their services.
When you have a million of such responses and results, you will find out for yourself that this is indeed a massive amount of precious data. This is what the big data is and how it can be used to make better business decisions, hit the revenue goals, create compelling content for digital experience and optimize customers interactions with your website by targeting individuals (e.g., dynamic retargeting).
Quite often digital marketers rely on third-party tools rather than collect data themselves which sometimes is very limited in their capabilities, so they eventually decide to build their own software. It’s proved that by choosing the right data provider one can reduce up to 60% of the cost and development time. In the long run, it’s cheaper than using third-party solutions.
Conclusions
Every click, switch, comment, redirect or any other microinteraction leaves a digital footprint that can be used for building a customer persona. Big Data starts small. It’s formed by collecting valuable information and used for improving business processes and customer experience in any field.
As Internet users, we are leaving the digital footprint every day and, as digital marketers, we operate with this data without even noticing it. Sometimes we tend to hire data scientists and ready to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but more often than not only big guys can afford it. Usually, to use and execute Big Data a developer or two should be enough.
Big Data isn’t only for data scientists and massive corporations. Anybody can benefit from it. We hope this article has given general understanding of what going on with Big Data, what that is and how it can be used. We also believe that it might help you make a decision of building your own software such as SEO platform, digital marketing platform, etc.